


Pyre

by De Orakle (Delphi)



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Aftermath, Canonical Character Death, Drama, Established Relationship, Grief/Mourning, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2001-01-01
Updated: 2001-01-01
Packaged: 2017-10-12 05:09:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/121133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Delphi/pseuds/De%20Orakle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Conversation in a crematorium.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pyre

**Author's Note:**

> Exact date of publication unknown.

The dead children haunt Severus Snape's waking dreams tonight. He deserves no less. They whisper in his ear from the inside. Sometimes they scream. He knows all their faces, and he knows all their names.

It's Cedric Diggory in the forefront, of course. Pale Cedric, perfect and terrible in the way that only a dead beauty can be. The others are glimpsed through the fog of memory, auburn and blonde; black hair in the shadows. Grey eyes and green accuse him of unspeakable wrongs.

Their voices click like insects. Metallic, like the water from the lake; faster, until the syllables begin to knit themselves into English. Traitor. Murderer. Severus is entranced by their mouths, the lips and tongues that move in perfect accord, and as he feels his own voice rising to join them—

—he wakes.

He blinks, the inside of his eyelids like sandpaper against his tired eyes. He stares through the darkness at the spent pyre and can't get the sound of their voices out of his head.

How long has he been standing here? Night is at its blackest, and his legs are stiff. He could imagine that he has grown right out of the floor, a statue, a gargoyle spawned from the flagstones. He's too tired to move and too wide-awake to do anything but lose himself in the shadows until his eyes turn to glass and he forgets how to breathe.

He tries to remember...he tries to remember yesterday and the day before that, skirting the great grey gap between the boy's death and his own return to the castle from...

He frowns, the tangle of memories growing thick and riddling as a hedge maze. Insight is sharp as thorns—familiar voices from the shadows of black cowls, the red-hot brand on his forearm, and a cold high voice, and _pain_.

The maze twists and turns, and Severus is in the middle of it trying to find the portkey that will take him away from this place.

This place...

This place has an abandoned air. Haunted—not by ghosts but by utter nothingness. All traces of recent mourners and their dead have faded away. Moss grows between the flagstones, scrub, more brown than green, half-dead and still struggling for existence in what was once a sickroom before the Black Plague came to Hogwarts and found it another use. This room is ever filled with death, dying itself, and still the moss and the pyre and the stone hold tight.

Pale moonlight shines down in strips, cut open by the shadow of a grate in the ceiling above the pyre. There is a window, also barred, and on the ledge outside sit three black birds, perched so still that Severus only took notice of them when the black of night began to melt into the darkest hues of blue and green. They're huge, the crows or ravens or magpies—he can't tell which—raised up on the strange creatures and strange magic of the Forbidden Forest. Sharp-eyed and sharp-beaked, they peer back at him with cruel patience.

Three for a funeral...

He might consider them portents if he were a man given to looking for omens. He is not. Severus Snape was born into a world that has always been exactly what it should be, no less and certainly no more, and he has come here to remember, not to foretell.

His mind wanders through the corridors, up the stairs to where there is life in the castle—men and women tired beyond the lateness of the hour. He is not tempted to join them, yet takes some dim comfort in their presence. Even if all men are islands, still they embrace the ebb and flow of the tides; they are still creatures of the herd, and as much as he would deny it, Severus is no great exception. He has returned to the castle as he always does, to where he may be hated but at least his name is known.

He will go to no one tonight, seek out no conversation with the worried faces in the teachers' lounge or with Sinistra in her tower. He cannot bear their well-meaning questions, their foolish, transparent hopes that Diggory's death will be the last.

Instead he waits, though he tells himself he knows not for whom. He will not have to wait long.

"They say," a familiar voice breaks into the silence from a polite distance away, "that ravens usher the souls of the dead into the next world. I'm glad to see you home safe." This last is added as if an afterthought.

He did not hear Albus's approach, he rarely does. He does not turn around.

There is a long, silent pause, which the birds seem to regard with interest, cocking their heads and cawing softly.

"You're angry," Albus says.

Foolish—of course he is angry. Severus is always angry. What he knows Albus really means is, "You're angry with me," although the old man sounds disappointingly unconcerned by the prospect.

"I'm angry with what must be done," Severus replies.

"And that is?" There is the rustle of a paper bag. Severus recognises the sound: Albus is eating sweets.

He closes his eyes. "Make-believe," he whispers dispassionately. "Sleight of hand and sacrifice. We'll put out our eyes or take what we see to the grave. It is the same as the last time."

"Do you truly believe that?" Albus phrases it as polite inquiry, but Severus will not be drawn into argument.

"Everybody sees things differently," Albus continues. "That is the gift, and the curse I think, of free will."

Severus stares down at his feet. The mud from the castle grounds is drying on his boots, black, thick. It was once cultivated land out there, fields of wheat and corn surrounding the castle keep for as far as geography allowed. The blood and sweat of generations of peasants was wrought here, only to be destroyed. Not all at once, through some drought or massacre, but piece by piece, metre by metre, overtaken by the magic-infused forest with vegetable patience.

The grounds, Severus believes, are only alive by magic now, alive in the way a corpse lives, teeming with parasites and rot. It's fit for things not seen by the light of day. It is the last place in the world to look for wonder, and yet he still stares out into the shadows.

Behind him, Albus begins to hum a strange bit of melody, irritatingly familiar. Somewhere at the crossroads of mournful and jaunty, it brings to mind a funeral march played Big Band-style. Albus's unsculpted baritone fills the hallways with laughing trumpets and pallbearers stepping in unison.

Severus turns finally to throw Albus a scowl of annoyance. Albus appears not to notice. Lit up by a faint light at the end of his wand, he wears his purple and white striped nightshirt with ridiculous dignity. Severus takes in the lined brow, the shrewd gaze that turns on him and momentarily pins him down before he can blink it away as he did the dead children.

"Does it matter?" Severus asks.

"It matters very much to me." Albus slips a soft red candy between his lips.

Severus smiles bitterly. "Then I believe...it will all depend on whose story this turns out to be."

Albus nods thoughtfully. "Swedish berry?" He offers up his bag of candies.

Severus shakes his head.

Albus carefully chews another. "And if it is your story?"

"I have no story."

Now Albus smiles brilliantly, his eyes and teeth and spectacles glinting brightly. "Oh, I doubt that. I doubt that very much."

He steps forward and lays his hand on the back of Severus's neck. He allows Severus to flinch under the weight of his touch and waits until he settles. He brushes his thumb just under the line of Severus's collar. Thoughts of ravens and stories fade, replaced by the secret language of Albus's hand on his body.

Albus's skin is dry as parchment. His hands are like a skeleton's, and Severus recalls suddenly the preparation of Cedric Diggory's body for the pyre. While fingertips are tracing the bones of his neck, the curve of his ear, Severus is thinking of cold bodies. He thinks of dead boys and Albus's hands, and his flesh is torn between passion and disgust. But it is familiarity that wins out in the end. Familiarity, and a despair that has reached unimaginable blackness. Morning is too far away.

He leans against the door frame, unbuttons the top of his robes, and loosens his collar. He suffers Albus's touch, his kiss, with a sycophantic gratitude that he hates himself for.

And still nothing much comes of it—a shifting of weight against the wall and a few candy-flavoured kisses that fail to spark anything more. Albus has a way of touching him that's akin to how he speaks, as if there's more being said than what Severus hears. Some mystery in the pauses, in the breath between kisses. It makes Severus think restless thoughts.

"Listen," Severus says.

Silence hangs in the spaces between their breathing, a muffling softness wrapped tightly around them, thick enough to staunch the bleeding night. The black birds are silent. They sit motionless in the young trees. Severus holds his next breath.

All he can hear is Albus's soft smile, uncomprehending but indulgent.

"I hear nothing," Albus says.

Severus nods. "That is the sound of my story. Nothing."

A hum—amused, or chiding. "Are you certain about that?"

Albus lifts his arm from around Severus's shoulders and makes a motion with his wand. Not casting, merely a graceful wave as though conducting an orchestra. The black birds lift from the trees like a dark cloud, the heavy sound of their wings cutting through the gauze of silence.

The air seems to hum with some thin, distant music, an almost transparent sound like the ghost of a long-finished song. Severus looks away from the departing ravens to find Albus watching him with some unreadable expression.

"Maybe you're not listening hard enough," Albus says.

Severus scowls and clenches his jaw. He's well used to his anger. Loves it even, after a fashion, the way it lends him strength and curls up with him at night. This sudden red flash in his belly surprises even him, though. He pulls away, putting some of the stale air between him and Albus.

He returns his attention to the window, the birds all gone.

In his twilight eye, Albus is cremating the boy, Cedric. He has stripped him naked and anointed him with oil. Candles burn all around, white candles—tapers and pillars, wax and animal fat—all burning acrid black smoke. Albus touches the boy with obscene tenderness, caressing the young man's body as he would a small child. There are mourners, their faces hidden. They show no disgust at the old man's hands on the beautiful corpse. They only pray that this time there will be no ghosts.

In that dreamtime, Albus sets the pyre alight and holds the boy's hand while the flesh crackles from his body. The boy is loved a thousand times more deeply in death than he ever could have been in life.

"Severus."

He tries to swallow. His mouth is very dry.

"I expect Minerva will return in the morning, and I've received word from Remus Lupin and Sirius Black. We must speak then of how matters are progressing."

"Very well," Severus says. Very calmly and in great detail he imagines Sirius Black laid out on the funeral pyre. Albus is not holding his hand or anointing him with gentleness. It is Severus who stands above him, knife in hand. Severus who slits him open from throat to groin, making as if to read the entrails for some lucky omen. Sirius is not yet dead. He screams for a long while and Severus is satisfied.

"You will—"

"—I know what I must do," Severus says. He doesn't want to speak of this, to tell anyone but Albus where he has been. The past fourteen years have changed nothing at all, merely sewn up bits and pieces of time until the horror of what he was is one with the angry ruin he's become. His history is not something he will offer up to these people, and he has no wish to glimpse the secrets that have made them who they are. There's too much pain there to go back, even if it's just with words. Always, it has been only Albus to whom Severus confides the thoughts he barely even dares admit to himself. How it all went wrong. How he misses both the cadre of power and the purpose he found in destroying it, and how now he wonders why. Albus always listens. He's good at listening, everybody says so.

And yet, through some inscrutable instinct, there have been times when Severus holds back. Some nights, in Albus's office for tea and conversation, he's overtaken by a deadly certainty that Albus is feeding on him, feeding on his pain—and without his pain, what will Severus be left with?

He wonders then, in those dark times, whether Albus's madness is not the cheerful eccentricity he affects, but something much colder, and terrible, and loving. Something like the gentleness of his hands on a dead child.

But it is too late to worry about these things. He treats himself to a comforting thought: how the little pieces of Albus's own history that he has gifted to Severus add to his own without taking anything away from him.

Albus changes his tune then to something quick and secretive, like a snake-charmer's melody. Severus closes his eyes, listening, not just to the music, but for the sound of wings. Yes, there it is, feathers rustling in the dark, and if he wanted to believe in such things, perhaps they're carrying Cedric Diggory's spirit away from this cursed place.

Albus's hands come to rest lightly on his shoulders. Very slowly, the fingers dig into tense muscle, and in Severus's mind's eye the room is alight with candles, Amos and Bathilda Diggory watching numbly as Albus performs the funerary rites. Such paternal love Albus bestows upon that corpse—humming lullabies as he disrobes it, working the boy's robes gently over the lifeless limbs. How Albus must love Cedric in that moment, love him in a way that the boy's grief-stricken parents cannot associate with the cold thing that is no longer their son.

Albus could never love the living with such strength, Severus thinks.

And his own deaths come to him:

...the stink of the beast still clinging to his robes, his legs trembling. Pettigrew and Black and Potter all laughing to themselves outside of the headmaster's office, laughing silently, but still Severus hears them in his head. Dumbledore making him sweet tea and letting Fawkes the phoenix perch on his shoulder.

...or the day that he has finally died inside, scraped open from wrist to elbow trying to rid himself of the mark burnt all the way through. Dumbledore dimming the lamps, wrapping a quilt around Severus's shoulders. Coddling him like a child and talking to him like a man.

Oh yes, he sees it now. It was nothing but that madness that made Albus love him then, and Severus's dim fate had made him almost perfect.

Almost. There are others now.

"You only love me when I'm dying," he murmurs without meaning to, and after a long silence, one of Albus's arms slips around his waist.

Severus's hair is gently parted away from the back of his neck; Albus's lips are dry and whispery, his kiss whiskery. Severus drops his chin to his chest and lets the space between kisses try to say it isn't true, even as his mind taunts him with images of Albus lowering him down into a grave as he's lowered him into his bed, covering Severus up with freshly-dug earth rather than with his body. He imagines Albus leaving him there to rot underground with the dead children.

"How you must hate me," Albus whispers against Severus's skin.

Severus closes his eyes. Tries to find some denial and cannot. Albus kisses him again.

"You've every right to, Severus, more right than anyone else." Albus's voice is sad and plain, almost unrecognizable without its cheerful pretensions. "You know that I have never doubted your loyalty, but I would not have begrudged you one jot had you walked out on the night of Cedric's death, fled for some faraway port and never returned. But I do have to admit..."

Albus exhales very softly against the back of Severus's neck.

"...that if someone must hate me most, I'm glad it is one who loves me well."

Albus's embrace tightens for a moment and then fades away.

Severus stares into the crematorium. There is the gentle slap of Albus's slippered feet on the stone floor. Then there is nothing.

He allows himself to slowly slump to the floor. His bones and muscles protest as he pulls his knees to his chest, resting his head on his folded arms.

He wonders if Albus hears the children's voices, the chorus that echoes faintly in the back of his skull, warring with dread of the morning. He wonders if it ever goes away.

Or if one just...goes slowly mad.


End file.
